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Microsoft Worked With Google To Bring Progressive Web Apps To the Play Store (thurrott.com) 42

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Microsoft has been collaborating with Google to ensure that their tools interoperate and can help developers get their Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) into the Play Store. From a report: "We're glad to announce a new collaboration between Microsoft and Google for the benefit of the web developer community," Microsoft's Judah Gabriel Himango announced. "Microsoft's PWABuilder and Google's Bubblewrap are now working together to help developers publish PWAs in the Google Play Store." As Himango explains, PWABuilder is a Microsoft tool that helps developers build PWAs from existing websites and publish them in app stores, while Bubblewrap is a Google tool and library used to generate and sign Google Play Store packages from PWAs. After months of collaboration, the two firms have made some interesting progress towards integrating the tools. Now, PWABuilder utilizes Bubblewrap "under the hood," as Himango puts it, allowing developers to package PWAs for the Play Store with PWABuilder that support the new web shortcuts standard. (On Windows 10, web shortcuts appear as jump lists.)
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Microsoft Worked With Google To Bring Progressive Web Apps To the Play Store More

Microsoft Worked With Google To Bring Progressive Web Apps To the Play Store

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  • What a pile of spaghetti (Score:5, Insightful)

    by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Monday July 13, 2020 @01:02PM (#60293982) Journal

    If that blurb doesn't reek of unintelligible tech speak combined with marketing speak, I'm not sure what does. A true spaghetti bowl of jargon attempting to sound coherent.

    • No kidding - I translated the technobabble as you can now easily publish web pages as "apps" in the google play store.

      oh. Yay.

      • Re:What a pile of spaghetti (Score:4, Insightful)

        by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Monday July 13, 2020 @01:23PM (#60294064) Journal

        This is one of the greatest downfalls of modern software producers. They are incapable of telling you what something does in simple, clear language. Their web sites look very much like this blurb.

        If you can't tell me what your software does without resorting to a cacophony of confusing and catch-all jargon, why should I care?

        • I think some pepole assume that if their boss can't even figure out what it is they do, then their job is secure. It's not true of course.

    • With today's code of conducts enforcing progressive political values I think they've just simplified their priorities. Make sure the application is politically progressive and the rest is just syntax....

    • Re:What a pile of spaghetti (Score:5, Informative)

      by Dynedain ( 141758 ) <slashdot2 AT anthonymclin DOT com> on Monday July 13, 2020 @03:30PM (#60294568) Homepage

      If you are a web developer, then this should make total sense. If you are a web developer and this article still didn't make sense, then you have some stuff you really need to brush up on.

      PWAs are a well-established technique for making a website load faster and be more "app like" using a manifest of declared assets and helper scripts. Android and IOS can already bookmark sites with PWA manifests to your homescreen so they look like apps. The announcement is for a mechanism to now get these into the Android app store so that developers of services don't have to maintain 2 different codebases (web app vs. native app).

      If you didn't understand that from the article, then the article wasn't for you. That doesn't make it "true spaghetti bowl of jargon attempting to sound coherent". There's a lot more to technology and "news for nerds" than whatever your particular domain is limited to.

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by nagora ( 177841 )

        If you are a web developer, then this should make total sense. If you are a web developer and this article still didn't make sense, then you have some stuff you really need to brush up on.

        PWAs are a well-established technique for making a website load faster and be more "app like" using a manifest of declared assets and helper scripts.

        And there's your spaghetti right there.

        More bloat, more bugs, more wasted resources serving up trivial crap on an endless upgrade loop until the next "revolutionary" technique comes along. And all the time, the actual products do less and less and less worth doing while passing back more and more and more tracking information - which after all is their main function.

        • You've done a great job demonstrating that you don't have the faintest clue of what this stuff entails.

    • What's a progressive web app? I'm envisioning some sort of social justice based click bait site.

  • What about (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    How about they work on providing some conservative web apps!
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Progressive Web Apps are just offline web pages (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Can'tNot ( 5553824 ) on Monday July 13, 2020 @01:44PM (#60294152)
    I had to look up what "Progressive Web Apps" are to understand this article, neither the summary nor the story defines the term. Evidently they're just javascript-heavy webpages which work offline. Browsers are the new JVMs, I guess.

    Hopefully some other confused person is now enlightened.
    • Think of it this way . As a marketer , instead of sending an email , and hoping for a response , now you can send an email enabled ProgressiveWebApp and collect their PC name, IP Address and geolocation every time they view the email. and if Facebook is already authenticated , maybe collect all their friends names too.

    • Every so often the wheel gets re-invented in tech. Thin clients and fat servers. Everything in a container because we forgot about static binaries.

    • You're right about browsers being generic runtime environments, and that has arguably been the case for years :-) PWA has the additional advantage that some browsers detect the "standard" and can save an icon/shortcut on your desktop/phone's home screen (allegedly even native to Microsoft's app store, although I have no experience with it). Which thus allows the Javascript-capable developer to create an "app" that can be downloaded and installed directly without going through the app store (see the irony?).

      • This is without mentioning that so many "company" apps on the app store is just an empty shell with a web view added anyway.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by znrt ( 2424692 )

      it's indeed just a fancy name but it is more than "offline web apps". these can for all intents and purposes be local desktop apps accessing local hardware services, while at the same time benefit from web deployment and distribution, or work as a hybrid with different capabilities depending on context. this is what 'progressive' wants to convey.

      the distinction between web app and desktop app has been blurring for a while, and desktop apps developed with web interface aren't uncommon nowadays. putting them

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jonwil ( 467024 )

      Sounds a lot like what has been done with Electron for ages now only with more Microsoft...

    • I think PWAs are the next HTAs (Hyper Text Applications), a failed attempt by Microsoft to use web pages as local programs, back in the days of Internet Explorer 5 or 6. Off course, this was a security nightmare, as you only had to use the .hta extension to get full control over the local machine.

      Running web tech on the local machine, unsandboxed and with full privileged, was always a bad idea, and this hasn't changed.

  • Companies work together? BAD!
    Companies not working together? Also BAD!
    Any new thing? BAD BAD!!!

  • and it was completely fitting my gut feel after the headline, until the "with Google" made me track back... ^^

    First Linux is not the devil anymore (but a nutricious blood source), now this ... Something is afoot in the MS culture.
    *prays for biiiiig bada...boom* O:-)

  • (Okay, real comment this time.)

    So I can link between different parts of different apps. Then a URL bar, and mobile OSes have effectiively become browsers, re-invented, badly...

    How man decades do you think, until they re-invent Unix... yet again..., badly-er?

  • Because they have no idea what it is and the right wing chuds will eat it up.

    Fox News: LIBS GO MASK OFF IN THE TECH SECTOR!

  • I hate javascript as much as the next developer. It's shitty to work with. There are a plethora of frameworks and paradigms you have to know and understand before chaining them all together into a cluster-fuck of code that runs like shit in a browser that is forever changing. But it's our only common denominator. We were well on our way to cross-platform execution with standard web tech. Then the mobile platforms came in and fucked it all up. PWA's are a move back in the right direction.
  • Support is shit in iOS.

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